Staff Pick
Mesmerizing, thoughtful, and haunting, Ellingsen's Not Dark Yet exemplifies the power of ecofiction. Recommended By Kate G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Brandon leaves his boyfriend in the city for a quiet life in the mountains after an affair with a professor ends with Brandon being forced to kill a research animal. It is a violent, unfortunate episode that conjures memories from his military background.
In the mountains, his new neighbors are using the increased temperatures to stage an ambitious agricultural project in an effort to combat globally heightened food prices and shortages. Brandon gets swept along with their optimism, while simultaneously applying to a new astronaut training program. However, he learns that these changes — internal, external — are irreversible.
A sublime love story coupled with the universal struggle for personal understanding, Not Dark Yet is an informed novel of consequences with an ever-tightening emotional grip on the reader.
Review
"[Ellingsen] is just starting what promises to be a major career, but already giving readers a unique and fascinating perspective." Jeff VanderMeer
Review
"...suspenseful and haunting... Ellingsen projects a feeling of encroaching darkness on every page, 'the shadow of a Kraken passing beneath the surface,' and this tension guides the narrative like a purposeful current. Expansive and unsettling descriptions make it easy to fall under the story's spell. This is a remarkable novel from a very talented author." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Not Dark Yet by Berit Ellingsen wants to take you places. The story moves from the city to the country, flirts with the stars and all the space in between, and takes short jaunts back to the city. Setting plays an important role, a wonderful success of Ellingsen's prose considering there is never a country or city name written. You don't need them. These are your places, they're everyone's." Late Night Library
Review
"Ellingsen charts a new course that is at times Kafkaesque and always mesmerizing. An ambiguous and luminous and mysterious text that changes shape and meaning on rereading, as with all the the best fiction." Electric Literature
Synopsis
*Favorite books of 2015 --Electric Literature
"Fascinating, surreal, gorgeously written, and like nothing you've ever read before, Not Dark Yet is the book we all need to read right now. It is art about science, climate change, and activism, and it vitally explores how we as people deal with a world that is transforming in terrifying ways."
--BuzzFeed
Brandon leaves his boyfriend in the city for a quiet life in the mountains after an affair with a professor ends with Brandon being forced to kill a research animal. It is a violent, unfortunate episode that conjures memories from his military background.
In the mountains, his new neighbors are using the increased temperatures to stage an ambitious agricultural project in an effort to combat globally heightened food prices and shortages. Brandon gets swept along with their optimism, while simultaneously applying to a new astronaut training program. However, he learns that these changes--internal, external--are irreversible.
A sublime love story coupled with the universal struggle for personal understanding, Not Dark Yet is an informed novel of consequences with an ever-tightening emotional grip on the reader.
About the Author
Berit Ellingsen is a Korean-Norwegian writer whose stories have appeared in Norton's Flash Fiction International Anthology, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Unstuck. She is the author of the story collection Beneath the Liquid Skin, and the novel Une Ville Vide, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the British Science Fiction Award.